The 14th of July, 1994. A warm Thursday in the city of London. A woman of 30 walks through the door of St. Steven Wahbrook off Queen Victoria Street and gets married. The church was designed by Christopher Ren and completed in 1679, one of 51 parish churches he rebuilt after the Great Fire of London.
Its stone dome is a smaller rehearsal for the dome of St. Paul’s which Ren was designing at the same time. Inside the church dominating the circular altar is a large travertine altar by Henry Moore installed in 1972. It’s a serious beautiful building. It holds a few hundred people at most. The ceremony lasts 30 minutes.
When it ends, the bride and groom step out onto the pavement and discover that their driver hasn’t expected them to finish so quickly. Nobody has. The Queen of England, the Queen Mother, and the Princess of Wales are left waiting on the church steps while someone goes to find the cars. The bride’s name is Lady Sarah Armstrong Jones.
She is the only daughter of Princess Margaret. She is wearing a gown by Jasper Conraan, ivory georgette fabric, square cut corseted bodice, long sleeves, the design drawn from a holine portrait. On her head is a tiara assembled from three diamond brooches her father, Lord Snowden, gave her mother on their wedding day in 1960.
She borrowed pearl and diamond earrings from Princess Margaret that morning before the ceremony at Kensington Palace. Her halfsister, Lady Francis Armstrong Jones, is one of three bridesmaids. Her cousin’s daughter, Zara Phillips, and a family friend named Terara Noble Singh, are the other two. The bridesmaids wear white corset lace up gowns with round necklines and fresh pink flowers in their hair.
There is no royal carriage. There is no crowd lining the street, not in any significant numbers. There is no official press photographer, only the one the family arranged. The groom is a man named Daniel Cado. He is the son of an actor, Tom Cado, who died in 1982, and a theatrical agent named Ross Cado. He has no title and no inherited estate.
He proposed with an early 19th century diamondcluster ring with table cut stones chosen at Wartsky’s the royal jeweler. And he had recently given up acting to focus entirely on painting. He is 37 years old. The queen is present. So is the Duke of Edinburgh. So is the queen mother who will die 8 years later.
So is Princess Anne. So is Prince Edward with his then girlfriend Sophie Reese Jones. So is Princess Diana in black and white who ensures the attention remains firmly on the bride and groom despite the fact that two weeks ago on the 29th of June, the Prince of Wales admitted on national television that he had been unfaithful to her.
Sarah’s wedding is the first public event Charles and Diana attend together following that confession. Diana smiles and waves to the modest crowd and behaves with exemplary grace. Everyone notices this. Everyone writes about it. Nobody gets a photograph of the bride that the family didn’t arrange. After the service, the party goes to Clarence House, the Queen Mother’s residence, for the reception.
Sarah and Daniel fly to India for their honeymoon, the country where they first met. Princess Margaret is alive and well on those church steps 38 days away from her 64th birthday. She watches her daughter make every choice that led to this particular morning. The small Ren church, the man with no title, the 30inut ceremony, the reception at a family house rather than a rented stateateroom, and she appears by every account of those who know her to approve of all of it.
What she can’t know is how the next 7 years and 8 months will go or that when she dies in February 2002, her daughter will be at her side. What she can’t see from those church steps is the shape of the life her daughter is building with this quiet ceremony as its foundation. But she raised this daughter inside the institution and she watched what the institution did to people.
and she knows the difference between what she has had and what Sarah is beginning. Sarah Francis Elizabeth Armstrong Jones was born on the 1st of May 1964 at Kensington Palace. She weighed 6 lb and 2 o. A bulletin posted at 8:29 in the morning recorded that mother and baby were making good progress.
Lord Snowden, informed of the birth, toasted it in champagne with the household staff and told them, “She looks a super baby.” Within hours, the first visitors arrived, Sarah’s two grandmothers, the Queen Mother and the Countess of Ross, and her aunt, Queen Elizabeth II. She was the last royal baby born at a palace rather than a hospital.
Her brother David, later Viccount Linley and now the second Earl of Snowden, had been born in 1961. She was the youngest grandchild of King George V 6th and Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, born 7th in the line of succession to the throne. Her parents, to the outside world, were the glamorous couple of the age. Margaret was 33.
Snowden was 34. They had married at Westminster Abbey on the 6th of May, 1960. The first royal marriage to a commoner in centuries, attended by 2,000 guests and watched by 20 million people on television. They had moved into Kensington Palace’s apartment 10, which became the site of famous parties, McJagger, Peter Sers, the Aakon, artists, and actors, and the full social world of swinging London passing through its rooms.
Behind the parties, the marriage was already in serious trouble. On the 28th of May 1960, 3 weeks into the honeymoon on the royal yacht Britannia, a daughter named Polly Fry was born in London. Lord Snowden was her father. He had conducted the affair with her mother, Camila Fry, while engaged to Princess Margaret.
Pauliey’s paternity wasn’t confirmed publicly until a DNA test in 2004. But within the Armstrong Jones family circle, the facts weren’t entirely unknown. By the mid 1960s, the biographer Anne Dorsy documents in her standard life of Snowden, his affairs were a defining and worsening feature of the marriage. Margaret had affairs of her own, beginning with her godfather, the wine producer Anthony Barton.
In 1973, she began what her biographers would describe as her most significant relationship outside the marriage with a gardener named Rodney Llewellyn, 17 years her junior. None of this was visible to the public. Very little of it was acknowledged within the household. The children were largely in the care of Nanny Verona Sumner, described by one contemporary as frightfully grand, someone who taught Hur instead of humility.
And as the author Christopher Warick later noted, whatever her narrow ways, Miss Sumner did at least act as a buffer between the children when they were at home from school and the misery that their parents’ marriage had become in its death rows. What the children had in place of domestic tranquility was an extraordinary set of alternative arrangements.
Christmases at Sandringham where the full royal family gathered. Summers at Balmoral where Sarah would quietly sketch wild flowers during the long northern evenings. Weekends depending on which parent at Nims in Sussex with Snowden or at Royal Lodge in Windsor with Margaret. and through all of it, a sustained proximity to the queen, who was watching her younger sister’s marriage fail with a private alarm she almost never expressed publicly, and who made deliberate arrangements to ensure that Margaret’s children spent significant time at Buckingham Palace and at Windsor. The day-to-day reality of a childhood at Kensington Palace was, by any external measure, rarified. Apartment 10 occupies three floors and looks over the palace’s private gardens. There were staff, a nanny, a schedule of protocol Margaret
insisted upon, curtsies, place settings, French, alongside the casual disorder of a household where the parents spent stretches of time not speaking. Margaret, by multiple accounts, was never overtly maternal in the conventional sense. She found babies and small children difficult. She preferred male company and by the testimony of those who knew the household doted on David more openly than on Sarah.
She instructed the staff that the children were never to wake her before 11 in the morning. That rule Nanny Sumner enforced. One of Sarah’s first public appearances was as a bridesmaid at Princess Anne’s wedding in November 1973, age nine. The photographs show her in a long dress, seriousfaced, composed.
She was enrolled at Francis Holland School in Chelsea, the smart all girls day school on Graham Terrace, where she is remembered by at least one contemporary for having told her classmates that her aunt was the queen. Nobody believed her. The queen, for her part, was making the relationship unmistakable through observable behavior.
School holidays brought Margaret’s children to Buckingham Palace and Windsor on a regular basis. A profile of Sarah published in Woman’s Realm in May 1982 when she was 17 noted that the queen providing loving and understanding support, particularly to her niece, who emotionally missed her father greatly. A later Daily Mail piece drawing on sources who had watched the relationship across decades described the queen as providing relief from the performances that surrounded them both.
Two people who found in each other’s company something quieter and more useful than the world generally offered either of them. What Sarah absorbed from that proximity was both a corrective and a model. Margaret represented one possible outcome. The spectacular visibility of a life conducted without guard rails, the attention that fed the person and then consume them.
The queen offered a different posture, the understanding that the institution’s demands could be met on your own terms if you approach them with enough steadiness. Both women were formative. The lessons they provided pointed in opposite directions. In 1975, when Sarah was 11, she and David were sent to Beedale’s school in the village of Steep near Petersfield in Hampshire.
It’s a co-educational boarding and day school founded in 1893. The only co-educational boarding school of its kind at the time, described by contemporaries as warm, nurturing, progressive, the polar opposite of the starchiness of a formal royal upbringing. A family friend had recommended it, advising that Francis Holland might be a little too narrow for someone like Sarah, who would meet all sorts of people in her life.
The head mistress at Francis Holland was reportedly not pleased, having heard that at Beedale’s people ate off each other’s plates. Margaret and Snowden, by this point barely communicating in private, went to Beedale’s together to explain the transfer to their children. They presented a united front.
They left separately. It was one of the last joint acts of their marriage. The headmaster of the middle school recalled Sarah as always immensely sweet and very popular. A less generous contemporary remembered her as often alone as someone other students made a special effort to include.
Not glamorous, not particularly royal in affect, just a girl at a boarding school who happened to have a very public family situation. She was, that contemporary noted, very square, short, and a bit dumpy. Neither she nor her brother in the slightest bit attractive, which is to say she was an ordinarylooking 11-year-old at a new school, learning how to be a medallion, which meant by the school’s own ethos, modifying your accent and not spending your holidays chasing social engagements in London.
February 1976, an Australian journalist named Ross Wayby based in New York hears that Princess Margaret is holiday on Mystique, the private island in the Grenardines where she keeps a villa called Leoli O built for her by her friend Colin Tenant. We obtains a photograph of the princess with Rody Lulellen.
The photograph is published and immediately produces a presstorm. Sarah was 11 at the time of the photograph. She would turn 12 on the 1st of May. She was at Beedale’s which insulated her from the most immediate explosion. No newspapers in the school library, a physical distance from London, but not from its consequences. On the 19th of March 1976, Buckingham Palace announced formally that Princess Margaret and Lord Snowden were separating after 16 years of marriage.
The New York Times ran the story on its front page. The BBC covered it on its main evening news. The separation at the time was widely described as the first formal royal separation since the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. What followed it was the first royal divorce in the modern era. Decree Nissi came in May 1978. Decree absolute on the 11th of July 1978.
The marriage was formally ended. Sarah was 14. The Daily Mail reporting on Sarah in 2016 drew on those who knew the household during this period. The divorce had been terribly upsetting for her. She was, one source said, devastated. Margaret was granted custody. The children stayed in Kensington Palace.
Their father purchased a house in Lawncest Place with money from the separation agreement, £100,000 from the princess, held in trust for the children. He agreed to continue splitting the school fees. The headmaster’s warm memory of Sarah at Beedales sits alongside a bleeaker portrait from a fellow student, of a girl who was often on her own, who seemed neither glamorous nor obviously resilient, who weathered the school, knowing that the most photographed romantic scandal in Britain involved her mother, published on the front pages of newspapers that every adult in the country had seen, and that this was simply the act of her life. Hugo Vickers in his standard biography of Princess Margaret characterizes Sarah’s reaction to that period in terms that have been widely reported since. A private expression of bewilderment that anyone
would accept the costs that went with the crown. The exact wording is Vickers’s paraphrase rather than a verbatim quotation. the biographer’s sense of what Sarah conveyed privately about why anyone would choose to be a princess if that was what it cost. Whether or not those were her precise words, the circumstantial evidence supports the underlying conclusion.
She watched her mother be turned into a national spectacle at the precise age when children are most acutely sensitive to a parents humiliation. She watched the press make a cover photograph out of her mother’s private life. She drew from it a conclusion she would spend the next five decades acting on.
She left beeds with a single A level in art. In September 1982, at 18, Sarah began a foundation course at Camberwell School of Art, the institution that is now part of University of the Arts London, then a working art school in South London on Peekom Road, as far removed from the circuit of palace drawing rooms as she could get while still living in the same city.
She was already serious before she arrived. In June 1982, three months before starting at Campberwell, she became the first member of the royal family since Lady Patricia Ramsay, Princess Patricia of Connot, who had renounced her royal title to marry a naval officer in 1919 to have work accepted for the Royal Academy summer exhibition.
Two paintings selected from more than 13,000 submissions. Her father told the Daily Express, “I’m thrilled about the summer exhibition, but I’ve promised Sarah not to see her pictures until I go along with her.” He described her that same year as a conscientious and decided worker who always has a pencil or brush in hand, even when staying the weekend with him at his Sussex home.
After the foundation course at Camberwell, she spent two years in India with her father, who had been engaged to photograph the production of David Lean’s A Passage to India. The film’s producer was John Natchbull, the seventh Baron Brabborn, a Mountbatton connection, married to Lord Mountbatton’s elder daughter, Lady Patricia, who gave Sarah a job as an intern in the wardrobe department.
She also studied wood gilding under her father’s cousin Thomas Messel. She was working anonymously on a film set in a country she didn’t know doing the practical work of costume and production. On a different British project filming in India at the same time, the merchant ivory film Heat and Dust, an actor named Daniel Cado had a small role.
He was the son of Tom Cado and the theatrical agent Rosado. He was 26. They met. They shared at minimum the same aesthetic seriousness about the visual world. They didn’t become romantically involved immediately. It would take several more years. Returning to England, Sarah enrolled in a 2-year course in textile and fabric design at Middle Sex Polytenic.
She didn’t complete it. A group of fellow students made life sufficiently unpleasant. Royal baiting as one friend described it to the press at the time that she eventually left. She transferred to the Royal Academy Schools where she would remain for 8 years. Undergraduate diploma in 1988, post-graduate diploma in 1991.
At the Royal Academy, she won the Windsor and Newton Prize in 1988 and the Kreswick landscape prize in 1990. She had her first exhibition at the Kdugan Contemporary Gallery in Chelsea in 1990 where a critic noted, “She isn’t to be sniffed at. The pictures have great charm and the paintings are worth their money, whoever they are by.
” During those same years, the question of the civil list came up as her contemporaries within the extended royal family accepted their allowances, the mechanism by which Parliament funded working royals and their households. Sarah reportedly didn’t take one. Whether by formal decision or simply by arrangement, the research record isn’t explicit. The effect was the same.
She wasn’t on the government’s payroll for royal duties she wasn’t performing. She supported herself on commissions in the proceeds of her exhibitions, supplemented by the modest private provision her grandmother, the queen mother, had made for her. One contemporary from that period noted that what the Royal Academy gave her beyond the diplomas and the prizes was a community of people who engaged with her work rather than her title.
She dropped hangers on and sought out those genuine enough to appreciate her abilities for what they were. The peer group that formed around her painting practice was an art school peer group. Bedale’s friends with Rosta hair as one guest at her 21st birthday party remembered invited alongside her cousins at Windsor Castle.
The relationship with Daniel Chado deepened slowly. He had given up acting by the late 1980s. A friend told the press he had only done it because he was good-looking and because of his mother’s connections. What he actually wanted was to paint. From 1986 onward, he and Sarah were photographed together at gallery openings and art world events.
They set up home together in Kensington while unmarried, which reportedly enraged Princess Margaret, a woman who held old-fashioned views on the subject while having conducted several years of her own relationship with Rody Llewellyn across international press headlines. On the 5th of May 1994, the engagement was announced.
Daniel had proposed with an early 19th century diamond cluster ring with table cut stones surrounded by a red gold shank chased with roses chosen at wartskis. Lord Snowden took the engagement photographs. That Thursday in July, the church on Queen Victoria Street, St. Steven Walbrook’s recctor in 1994 was the Reverend Chad Vara.
Vara had founded the Samaritans at that same church in 1953, the crisis charity built inside the building where the wedding would take place 41 years later. Sarah chose that church and that officient herself. Her brother David had married Serena Stanh Hope, daughter of the 12th Earl of Harrington at Westminster Abbey the previous year.
Sarah chose a city church seating a few hundred. The difference in scale between those two venues isn’t accidental. Westminster Abbey holds 2,000. St. Steven Wahbrook holds in comfortable arrangement. Considerably fewer than 200. Tatler’s retrospective account says 200 guests attended. Other sources suggest the number was smaller.
What is unambiguous is that the ceremony was brief. The guest list was family and close friends, and the cars weren’t where they needed to be when it was over. The wedding fell at an extraordinary moment in the family’s recent history. Two weeks earlier, Prince Charles had admitted on national television that he had been unfaithful to his wife.
The ITV interview with Jonathan Dimbley had aired on the 29th of June. And when the journalist asked whether Charles had been faithful and honorable to Diana, he had answered yes until the marriage became irretrievably broken down, us both having tried. Sarah’s wedding was the first public event Charles and Diana attended jointly after that disclosure.
Diana wore a black and white silk dress and spent the morning ensuring the attention remained on the bride. Sarah wore the Jasper Conran gown. Conrad had been inspired by a Holine portrait, the bodice corseted, the sleeves long, the ivory georgette falling in layers. The Snowden floral tiara was new, made specifically for the occasion at Wartsky’s from the three diamond brooches Snowden had given Margaret in 1960 to mark their wedding.
A few small flowers were woven through the diamond setting. The pearl and diamond earrings Sarah wore that morning had been borrowed from her mother. She would inherit them after Margaret’s death. The officient said the words. The choir sang. The Henry Moore altar stood at the center of Ren’s dome.
The ceremony lasted 30 minutes. The congregation filed out. The cars weren’t where they should be. Diana waited on the steps. The Queen waited. The Queen Mother waited. There is something in this. The three women most photographed in Britain in the preceding 20 years, standing outside a church on a Thursday afternoon while someone went to fetch the cars.
That suggests the entire enterprise was operating on its own set of rules. Nobody was performing. Nobody was staging the moment for cameras that weren’t there. It was in its particular way exactly what Sarah had planned. The reception was at Clarence House. The honeymoon was in India, the country where they had met on a film set 11 years earlier.
Margaret had been declining for some years before the wedding, and her daughter knew it. The heavy smoking had produced consequences that were no longer invisible. In 1985, she underwent a lung operation, a partial removal, the direct consequence of decades of cigarettes, from which she recovered, but which further narrowed her reserves.
In 1993, she was hospitalized with pneumonia. By the mid 1980s, she had begun to use a walking stick on some occasions, and the combination of alcohol and a life she acknowledged privately had not gone the way she had hoped produced a brittleleness that made sustained company difficult. What Margaret retained through all of it was her specific acuity. She noticed things.
She had opinions, most of them sharp, about the people and events around her. She had her particular kind of wit, the wit of someone who had grown up in the most scrutinized family in the country and had been performing since childhood. These qualities persisted even as the others failed.
Through this whole period, Sarah showed up. The Daily Mail, drawing on sources close to the family, stated plainly in 2016 that Sarah had been selfless and often left her own family overnight to drive to Kensington Palace to care for her mother. The characterization is consistent with everything else the record shows.
She visited regularly. Margaret was now living at apartment 1A in Kensington Palace, having moved after the divorce, while Prince and Princess Michael of Kent took over the larger apartment 10. Sarah brought the children to see their grandmother. Samuel, born at the Portland Hospital on the 28th of July, 1996.
Arthur, born at the same hospital on the 5th of February, 1999. Margaret, who had found babies and small children difficult throughout her adult life, was genuinely delighted by them. She found in them something that cut through the difficulty of her final years. The strokes began in 1998. The first came at Mystique during Margaret’s annual 3-week visit to the island.
Anne Glenn Connor, who had been Margaret’s Lady in Waiting for decades and was present during the Mystique years, recorded the texture of this period in her 2019 memoir, Lady in Waiting. The island that Margaret had first visited in the 1960s as a guest of Colin Tenant, who gave her the plot of land on which Leolio was built, had become by the 1990s both sanctuary and liability.
Margaret was there on the island in the Caribbean when the blood vessel gave way. She was airlifted to a hospital. She was tested. The damage was real. Three strokes in total between 1998 and 2001, each one narrowing the radius of her life. By 2001, she was largely confined to Kensington Palace in a wheelchair, her eyesight badly damaged by the scalding water that had burned her feet on Mystique in 1999.
Her left side partially affected, her hearing declining. She was still Margaret. She still had opinions, but the kingdom had reduced itself to a few rooms. Sarah visited. She brought Samuel, who was five in 2001, and Arthur, who was two. There are accounts of the grandmother in the wheelchair and the small boys, the ceramicist and the marine, though nobody could have predicted that then.
Somewhere in the rooms at Kensington Palace on an afternoon, with Margaret insisting on showing them something or asking them something in the way she had always engaged with people she liked. Margaret died on the 9th of February, 2002 at King Edward IIIth’s Hospital early in the morning. Craig Brown in his book about her records the fact in a single sentence.
Her children, Lord Lindley and Lady Sarah Cado were at her side. Sarah was 37, Samuel was 5, Arthur was three. Seven weeks later, on the 30th of March, the queen mother died at Royal Lodge, Windsor. Sarah had sat with the queen at her grandmother’s deathbed. Two deaths, seven weeks apart, both women who had functioned as mothers to her.
One by birth and one by the steady, deliberate proximity that had substituted for it. The subsequent press coverage focused almost entirely on the Queen’s grief. Very little was written about her nieces. In 2003, Sarah spoke to the Sunday Telegraph, one of the very few interviews she has given in her adult life.
She didn’t elaborate on what she called the disruptions of the previous year. What she said instead was about painting and about the particular discipline required when the children are small. With parenthood, your life changes completely in the nicest possible way. You have to juggle a bit. You have to be disciplined with the time.
At the moment, I just have the mornings to work and I just have to use that as best I can. She said she tried to get to the studio every morning. She said her ambition was just to carry on as best I can and get better and better. She also spoke about her grandmother. She just taught one how to look, Sarah said of the Queen Mother.
She doesn’t miss anything when she’s looking at things. She hasn’t got any of my paintings, but she always wanted to come and look at the progression, and she has been to the exhibition. The years since 2002 resist easy summary because the most significant thing about them is the sustained absence of drama. Sarah Cado continued doing what she had been doing before her mother died.
She went to the studio in the mornings. She painted. In 2004, she was named vice president of the Royal Ballet. Her mother had been its president. The role acknowledged both Sarah’s own sustained interest in dance and the continuity she represented with Margaret’s legacy. In 2024, she was named president.
She accepted without issuing a statement under the name Sarah Armstrong Jones. She has been represented by the Red Fern Gallery in Mayfair since 1995. In the most recent solo exhibition there, according to the gallery’s own account, over 34 of the paintings sold. The work is described by the designer and curator Patrick Kinmmont as growing like plants flowering or landscapes excavated over time from remembered indistinct horizons.
paintings that take the viewer into a profound contemplation of the world she seeks to know and the method she has mastered. He is describing abstract landscapes and interior scenes, oil on canvas and watercolor, work that is genuinely respected within the London art world and commands prices in the thousands.
In 2025, she donated a painting to a charity auction for Horatio’s Garden, the organization that creates accessible outdoor spaces in spinal injury hospitals. The painting was titled Studio Window, an oil on canvas from that year. “Art is such an important creative focus in Horatio’s gardens for patients with spinal injuries,” she said of the donation.
I am really delighted to be able to help the charity to raise vital funds for people facing life-changing injuries. Those two sentences are by any reasonable estimate most of what Sarah Cado has said publicly in the preceding 10 years. She appears at the Sandringham Christmas Service. She appears at the Easter service at Windsor.
She appeared at the lying instate for Queen Elizabeth II in September 2022. standing vigil in Westminster Hall alongside other grandchildren and nieces of the late queen. One of the eight figures stationed in silence around the coffin. She attended the National Gallery’s bsentenery board listed among the trustees and supporters of that institution’s 200th anniversary program in 2024.
Her name appearing in the official review document between those of other board members. She attends art exhibitions. She was photographed in April 2016 carrying a large cardboard box along the King’s Road in Chelsea, having collected it from the department store Peter Jones. She walked a quarter of a mile with the box under one arm, handbag in the other, wearing black trainers, a print skirt, and a thick navy coat.
The Daily Mail ran the photographs under the headline, “The refreshingly lowkey royal.” She and Daniel live in a small grade 2 listed terrace house in Kensington and a Georgian country farmhouse near Midhurst in West Sussex given to Sarah by her godfather the late philanthropist Simon Sainsbury. She judges sheep dog trials.
She paints at Balmoral when she visits. described by one royal source as spending hours with King Charles hunched over their easels in harmonious silence as they have been for years. King Charles greets her at public events with a kiss on each cheek, visibly and unself-consciously pleased to see her.
The Daily Mail’s royal source offered what has become the closest thing to an official characterization of their relationship. The queen adores Sarah and seeks out her company as often as possible. She is her absolute favorite younger royal. They are hugely at ease in each other’s company.
Much giggling can be heard when they are together. They share a sense of loyalty, fun, duty, and the ridiculous. This came from an unnamed source. It should be understood as that, but it coheres with the observable pattern across decades, the regular presence at family occasions, the private visits, the time spent with the queen at Balmoral and at Craig Owen Lodge.
Sarah was also, it’s worth noting, named among the godparents of Prince Harry. That relationship with a child who later made very different choices about the terms of his relationship with the institution does not require the script to draw conclusions. It’s simply part of the record.
Samuel Cado, born in July 1996, studied history of art at the University of Edinburgh, trained in ceramics at Northshore Pottery in Cathnes, completed a Royal Drawing School course, apprenticed in Japan with the master ceramicist Yagi Akira, and works from a studio in West Sussex. He exhibits internationally at Ceramics Brussels, at Ram Gallery in Oslo, and at the Tokyo Gallery in Keyoto, where he held a solo exhibition in 2024.
He told the Daily Mail in 2019. I’ve always had a strong affinity with creating objects, having spent much of my childhood crafting imagined landscapes and sculptural models, which naturally led me to clay during my later years at school. He also attended the Eaton College and the University of Edinburghough’s Sandringham Christmas service in recent years alongside his girlfriend Eleanor Exurggian, an artist and art historian whose appearance at the family Christmas generated engagement rumors that neither of them has confirmed. Arthur Cado, born in February 1999, attended Westminster Cathedral Choir School and then Eaton College, studied geography at Edinburgh, and as of June 2022, was serving with the Royal Marines. He appeared at the National Service of Thanksgiving for Queen
Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee at St. Paul’s Cathedral in 2022 in uniform, seated alongside his mother and brother. He maintains a considerably lower public profile than Samuel, which is a distinction worth noting. Neither carries a security detail. Neither is a working royal.
Neither has given the press a story. In 2022, a YouTube channel called Uncovering Hollywood published a video titled Lady Sarah Cado, the forgotten Windsor Daughter who inherited Princess Margaret’s tragic curse. It accumulated well over a 100,000 views. The comments below it tell a story that the title doesn’t anticipate.
The most liked responses don’t express pity. They express something closer to recognition. Lady Sarah Shadow is an example to all. I’ve long admired Sarah. How much courage has she shown over the years. She could be brought out to represent the royal family on integrity and teach them to behave in that manner.
What a lovely person. She was the opposite of her mother, it seems. The channel offered a tragedy. Its audience delivered a verdict of admiration. The frame the title imposed, forgotten daughter, curse inheritor, was rejected in the comments by the people it was meant to speak for. They knew what they were looking at.
They had been watching this family long enough to recognize the difference between someone who was consumed by it and someone who wasn’t. Those same commenters reach instinctively for comparisons. Princess Anne comes up repeatedly. Her practical affect, her nononsense approach to duty, her specific refusal to perform distress. The instinct is accurate.
What people are trying to name is a particular approach to royal life. meeting its obligations without being possessed by them. Appearing when required and disappearing when not, conducting a private life that the press can’t narrate because there is genuinely nothing to narrate. The distinction between this approach and the one Sarah’s mother followed isn’t a moral judgment.
It’s an observation about strategy and about what the institution costs people who engage with it on its own terms. Margaret gave it everything and received in return the kind of attention that ultimately looked more like siege than celebration. What it cost her, the drinking, the isolation, the final decade in a wheelchair in a few rooms at Kensington Palace is the argument that makes Sarah’s choices coherent.
She watched it happen. She drew her own conclusions. She has a useful acquaintance in Fergie, the Duchess of York, who said years later that when the notorious to sucking photographs of her affair with a financial adviser were published in 1992, Sarah Cado was absolutely charming to her.
One person who had watched her own mother humiliated in the press, going out of her way not to compound the humiliation of someone else who was in a similar position. The Daily Mail’s long profile of her, published in 2016, noted that both Diana and Fergie had always remarked on her kindness during the height of their respective scandals.
With no agenda, no particular ambitions or feeling of being slighted, a royal source told the paper, “Sarah has been happy to take a backseat in royal position jostling. She has rarely been heard to utter a criticism of her fellow royals and is totally trustworthy with secrets and gossip. That is the description of someone who understood early and correctly that the machinery of royal visibility rewards the people who refuse to feed it.
There is in the King George V 6th Memorial Chapel at Windsor Castle attached to the east end of St. George’s Chapel where guarder services are held and where centuries of English monarchs are buried, a small private enclosure. King George V 6th was interred there in 1952. The Queen Mother joined him in 2002.
Princess Margaret’s ashes were interred there the same year in April following her death in February. Queen Elizabeth II was laid to rest there in September 2022. Sarah’s connection to that space is by any reasonable estimate decades away. She turned 60 on the 1st of May 2024. She was at Balmoral that summer.
She painted. She is by every observable indicator in good health. still exhibiting, still appearing when the family needs her presence, still doing the work of both her roles, the private one in the studio, under her maiden name, and the occasional public one at the Easter service, at the Christmas walk at Sandringham, at the gallery event where the king greets her with visible pleasure.
She spoke in that 2003 Sunday Telegraph interview about what she had learned from the two women who shaped her most directly. Her grandmother, she said, taught her how to look. Her father taught her to build things, to make them, to keep a pencil in her hand. Her mother taught her, not in words, but by the full and costly example of her life, what she didn’t want.
She described why she had chosen painting. That’s what I really wanted to do, and I wasn’t much good at anything else. The 2015 solo exhibition at the Red Fern Gallery titled Sarah Armstrong Jones, recent paintings and drawings, running from December of that year through April 2016, showed intimate paintings and works on paper. Over 3/4 sold.
The studio window painting she donated to Horatio’s garden in 2025 is described as a colorful oil on canvas. A studio window, her studio, the view from inside the life she chose. More than 30 years after the 30inut ceremony at St. Steven Wahbrook, Princess Margaret’s daughter, is in her early 60s, still painting, married to the man she met on a film set in India in the early 1980s.
Mother of a ceramicist and a marine, she attends the Sandringham Christmas service and the Easter Vigil at Windsor and the gallery opening where her cousin, the King, greets her with a kiss on each cheek. She carries her own shopping. She walks a quarter of a mile along the king’s road with a package under one arm without appearing to notice anyone watching. She does not have a publicist.
She does not have a verified account on any social platform. She does not have a security detail. She is, in the language of the official record, 29th in the line of succession to the British throne, not a working royal, attending events and ceremonies with the wider royal family on a selective basis.
The audience watching these videos about this family has been waiting for someone in the story to come out the other side with their life intact. They have been watching for someone who saw what the machinery did to the people who let it run them and chose differently. In the YouTube comments under a video that got the framing exactly wrong, they found what they were looking for and named it plainly. She figured it out.
She is by the only criterion that turns out in the end to actually count happy. If you’d like more stories like this, subscribe.
